Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations aguashade question?

Newpond - I agree totally with Kelly's summary of the characteristics of Aquashade. He has a very good understanding of its uses and affects.

I will add a few extra comments and try and give some more insight to your questions.

When Aquashade is applied to an already stocked pond such as yours the dye acts or takes affect in water greater than 2 ft to suppress certain wavelengths of light transmision that are required by the growing plants. This assumes you apply adequate amounts of Aquashade to agree with label recomendations.

The deepest growing plant growth will begin to slowly die due to low light conditions. You may see a slow decline in algae growth and abundance over time as it deterioriates in the darkened environment.

One of the big decreases in algae that grow in the pond is with the growth and abundance of phytoplankton (microscopic algae) that constitutes the basis of the fish food chain. This basically means that less basic fish food will be produced in your pond. Thus now your fish have been put on essentially a lower food intake diet. Bottom line the same numbers of fish have to live on less food that is now present in your pond. If you try and maintain all the present numbers of fish each will become thinner because they overall will have less food. If you want to maintain plump growing fish, your options are: remove some fish, and or add more food to supppliment their diet.

From my experience with Aquashade used at label recommendations, I think it reduces the amount of fish that can grow in a pond by about 40% to 50%. I arrived at this amount because it limits the phytoplankton plant growth to the upper 2 ft of water, and the deeper water is no longer productive. Plus the upper 2 ft of water has a decreasing amount of productivity due to the gradually decreasing amount of light that is passing through the water to the point of extinction at around 2 ft deep. I think this then amounts to at least 40%-50% of the once producive zone in the pond.

My rule of thumb is feed the fish whenever they will visibly eat the food. Feed only what they clean up as you GRADUALLY add the food.

Nutrients will continually build-up in a pond with Aquashade especially if fish are fed. The nutrients will just not be incorporated or adsorbed by "typical" pond plants as fast as before Aquashade due to the suppressive affects of Aquashade. Sooner or later an algae or plant will invade the pond that can thrive in Aquashade and the nutrient rich conditions and then a new problem develops. These tolerant plants are often resistant to the common pond herbicides.